


Under a Wizard's Hands

by daphnerunning



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Multi, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:49:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnerunning/pseuds/daphnerunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Al-Sarmen's hands, Sinbad is forced to watch what happens to his friends after Sindria's fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under a Wizard's Hands

Al-Sarmen has wizards. Sinbad has known that for a long time, known that they have talent, known that they are trained.

 

He’d never imagined they’d make him watch this.

 

War is a numbers game, in the end. It’s easy to brag, as he had, that any man of Sindria could best any  _ten_  of the Kou Empire.

 

The Kou Empire had sent a thousand men for every one of Sindria’s. 

 

He’d been so sure, so confident, that with his own power he could take on any  _thousand_  men, and he’d outdone his own expectations. Two, three, maybe five thousand men had fallen by his own power, the tidal waves and lightning and pure bleeding energy he’d poured forth, trying not to think of the families of soldiers left back at home. It’s  _Sindria_  he’d fought for, fought with every drop of his own energy, fought until there was nothing left. 

 

Even a man who can conquer a thousand enemies can be bested by a thousand and one. 

 

Al-Sarmen has wizards, and after they’d blasted him to the ground, after they’d run him through with pikes, after they’d made him spit his life’s blood onto the sand, one of them had approached. He had smiled, and Sinbad had yanked the blade out of his own belly to cut him down.

 

Another had approached. With Al-Sarmen, there’s always another. This one had laid a hand—burning—no—so cold that it burns—on his forehead, and agony like Sinbad had never known had ripped through his body.

 

He had welcomed death. Even alone, with everything he’d built crumbling into nothingness, he’d welcomed the blackness as an old friend, one that he’d enjoyed flirting with too many times to mind the embrace.

 

But they’d kept him from Lady Death’s arms. They’d pulled the spears from his gut and chest and legs, and no matter how he fought, the wizards had healed him. They’d healed his body, and left him  _this_.

 

“Would you like to watch?”

 

He doesn’t want to watch. They have a length of chain clipped to the collar around his neck, and no one has bothered to wipe off the blood splattered over every part of him. The chain, fastened to a ring in the ground, isn’t long enough for him to stand, or even sit comfortably, and the tattered shreds of his pride won’t let him lie down.

 

His head aches, worse than the many, many wounds on his body, and everything about him feels  _raw_. They’d ripped it away, stripped him of his djinns and his vessels and his magic itself, leaving him this bruised, defenseless  _shell_. 

 

The wizards laugh, and cast the seeming, water figures leaping into being faster than Yamuraiha’s ever had. “How are your friends, Great King?”

 

They’d given his friends to the Empire, and kept him for themselves. Kou was never his enemy, though he was theirs. It had always been Al-Sarmen he hated, and it’s they who keep him now as a pet, chained and lashed and bleeding on the floor.

 

Some of them are so young, for all that they’re years older than Sinbad was when he’d first gone to war. It twists his stomach to see the shame, the hatred on Sharrkan’s face as he’s ransomed back to his family for the price of his sisters, given in marriages to the Empire that are no better than slavery. The royal house of Heliohapt has never been wealthy; now, Al-Sarmen laughs as they tell him how they’ll bring it down, how making the king and queen sell their children is just the beginning. 

 

“The Experiment we will reclaim, of course,” one of them purrs in his ear, and Sinbad has just a second’s image of Drakon, back in a filthy, swirling mess of chemicals and magic like the one Sinbad had pulled him out of. 

 

The wizards are talented. They make sure he can  _hear_  the crack of the whip as it lashes across Masrur and Hinahoho’s backs, striping them red and raw before they’re bound at the ankles and wrists, put into galleys as no more than beasts of burden. The wizards don’t care that Hinahoho is better at cards than any of them, or that for all his confidence Masrur hadn’t yet overcome his shyness to ask the pretty flower girl for a dance. 

 

Something twists in his chest, something he’s trying to ignore. 

 

_Ja’far wouldn’t—_

 

One of the wizards is in his head, and laughs. “We’ll get to your precious clerk.”

 

Sinbad can’t breathe.

 

They want to start a war with Spartos’ country of Sasan. They send a box to the King, and they let Sinbad hear the scream as the man finds his son’s head.

 

“You do collect some pretty ones, don’t you?” A wizard says, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “War is so difficult on women.”

 

Pisti has the most raucous laugh of any girl Sinbad knows, and has the distinction of being the only woman half his size ever to drink him under the table. Sinbad doesn’t want to watch what they do to her, but they’re in his mind, and the magic he no longer possesses forces his eyes open.

 

When he vomits, they kick him to the floor. 

 

“This one…she will be useful.”

 

Almost worse is watching them court Yamuraiha, offer her soft beds and the promise (so elusive) of freedom, talk to her sweetly about how misunderstood she is, about the privileges that come with being a  _good girl_  and  _behaving_. Her chains are made of gold, and after they hurt her, they send in a smiling man to wipe her tears away. They make Sinbad watch until she bites her lip, uncertain. “She will be ours, sooner than you expect. None of them have your strength.”

 

“What do you want from me?” 

 

It’s the first time he’s spoken since they’d taken him, and Sinbad hardly recognizes his own voice. One of them laughs, delighted, and the image shimmers. “You try to distract us at your peril. We would not forget to show you the fate of your favorite.”

 

Something twists in his chest, and goes ice-cold.

 

_“Your king is dead.”_

 

_Ja’far’s face is twisted in rage, denial, horror, and he spits in Kouen’s face._

 

Sinbad wants to vomit again. 

 

“We almost brought him back here,” one of the wizards muses. “It isn’t often we let one of ours live, after he turns traitor. But Kouen was very insistent, and he  _has_  been well-behaved.”

 

“He’s not one of yours.” Sinbad’s fingers curl against the floor, nails broken against the cold stone. “He was always too smart to be yours.”

 

They laugh at him. He hasn’t been  _powerless_  like this since he was a child, since the last time he’d been beaten bloody and sent to sleep on the floor without supper, and had decided that the streets were better than doing  _that_  again. 

 

At least then, he’d had the magic, and hope.

 

They make him watch, as Kouen’s guards rape his best friend. The wizards are talented, showing him every tear, every drop of blood, every look of agonized shame and terror in such perfect clarity that he can make out Ja’far’s freckles under the splatter of blood and a stranger’s seed. His stomach turns, but it’s no use turning his head away.  He’d hear the noises in any case, and he wants to kill them more than he’s ever wanted to kill anyone in the world, and he’s hated many people very intensely over the years.

 

They don’t know that just to be near Ja’far is an honor. They don’t care that it’s so much work to earn even a wry, begrudging smile, or that it’s worth it. They know nothing of the fact that it’s Ja’far more than Sinbad who’d kept Sindria running, kept the dream alive because the king was a wastrel, a lazy drunk, preoccupied with everyone else’s problems when he should be at home. They don’t care that on the few (so few, and he cherishes every memory) occasions he’d consented to share Sinbad’s bed, Sinbad had tried to memorize every shudder, every precious moment, the softness of his thighs, the taste of his lips, the way the moonlight reflected on his hair spread across Sinbad’s pillow—

 

They shove Ja’far’s face to the floor, and hold him there as they ride him like a mare, laughing when he screams. 

 

Ja’far had wanted him to take a wife. 

 

There had been so many petty fights, so much laughter. They’d been a  _family_ , or as close to one as most of them had ever had.

 

“I had wondered what it would take, to bring you to tears.” The wizard banishes the image, though the inside of his eyelids still shows him Ja’far beaten and choking around a stranger’s cock, and probably will for the rest of his short life. “Do you understand now, what that destiny is that you cleave to so desperately?”

 

Sinbad has never cared less for their words. He’d failed them, all of them. 

 

When they kick him to the floor, laughing and commanding him to sleep in his own blood and filth, he doesn’t fight them.

 

What is there left to fight for?


End file.
